Why Foreign Real Estate Investors Are Loving Ghana

Why Foreign Real Estate Investors Are Loving Ghana

With a GDP growth rate averaging 8.02% over the last five years, it is no wonder that Ghana is becoming the jewel in the crown of West Africa. International real-estate investors are sitting up and taking notice of the potential in the growing market.

Whereas Western real-estate investors for a long time preferred to expand their portfolios by investing in the Middle East, especially Dubai and Abu Dhabi, and the Far East, they sat up and noticed when the discovery of oil in Ghana led to a boom in the country’s real-estate market.

The discovery of a reservoir of oil, now known as the Jubilee Oil Field, just off the Ghanaian coast by US-based oil exploration company Kosmos Energy rates as one of the largest findings in West Africa.

Add to that a politically stable economy and it’s no surprise that several powerful property developers from Dubai and Abu Dhabi are seeking to enter joint ventures with local developers. This has led to large-scale residential, retail and commercial developments.

It’s not only developers from the Middle East that want to join the party. There has also been strong interest from companies in Russia and the Ukraine that believe the returns on real estate in Ghana far exceed those found in their own backyards.

And they are not wrong. In its latest report, the Housing Data Centre, which collates data from the real estate and housing sector in Ghana, released figures that indicate a sunny future for the country’s real-estate investment market.

Housing prices, which began soaring in 2013, were estimated to have risen by 50% in 2015; with the country’s housing deficit around 1.7 million units, according to the country’s Ministry of Water Resources, Works and Housing. In addition, the influx of foreign direct investment is driving a demand for commercial and residential properties.

Mobus Property has demonstrated excellent timing and vision in its business offering, making the most of this real-estate boom with a current stake of over USD 100 million worth of property developments in its three- to five-year development pipeline in Accra. The group currently has 150 000 m² (15 hectares) of land under development for residential, commercial and industrial purposes. This includes the Richfield Lifestyle Estate as its crown jewel.